With five Tony Awards to her name, Audra McDonald is a singer and actress so versatile, she succeeds at almost everything on the stage.

Except taking a bow.

At the end of "Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill," in which she plays Billie Holiday in one of the chanteuse's last performances, Ms. McDonald often looks like she would rather head for her dressing room than bask in the applause.

"Watch her! It's the quickest bow. It's like up, down," said her director, Lonny Price. "People try to cheer, but they are thwarted."

Ms. McDonald may not be able to escape so easily at Sunday's Tony Awards, where she has been nominated for best lead actress in a play. If she wins, she will become the actor with the most performance Tonys ( Julie Harris won five for acting, plus a lifetime achievement award). She would also be the first person in history to sweep all four acting categories, having already won Tonys for featured actress in a play, and both lead and featured actress in a musical.

Breaking these records is a subject she attempts to dispense with even faster than a curtain call.

Audra McDonald performs as Billie Holiday in 'Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill.' Reuters

"I won't feel like a failure if it doesn't happen, and I'll probably pass out if it does," said Ms. McDonald, 43 years old, seated in her dressing room amid orchids and Holiday images. "My life has already exceeded anything that I could have dreamed up."

Onstage since age 9 in Fresno, Calif., she had her eye on Broadway but wound up studying opera at Juilliard, which doesn't have a musical theater program. It was a mistake, or so she felt at the time.

"I just didn't research it," she said. "I was the worst performing student in every class. I was not doing what I wanted, and I didn't understand it."

A turnaround came when a teacher suggested she sing Francis Poulenc's "La Voix Humaine," a theatrical work based on a Jean Cocteau play.

She was a beacon of calm for another Juilliard student, Robert Battle, who met her on his first day as a freshman dance student. Now the artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, he remembered them later listening to a recording of the jazz singer Sarah Vaughan. Ms. McDonald was captivated by the liberties Vaughan took with "My Man's Gone Now," he said.

ENLARGE

Audra McDonald
Ramsay de Give for The Wall Street Journal

Like Vaughan, Mr. Battle said, Ms. McDonald is vocally agile. "She can take on so many different personas in her voice."

That ability brought her near-immediate professional success. After graduating in 1993, she won her first Tony in 1994 as Carrie Pipperidge in "Carousel."

"She just popped out when I saw 'Carousel,' " said playwright Terrence McNally, who at the time needed an actress to sing a Verdi aria in his play "Master Class." "I was praying she'd want to do this part."

She did. And in "Master Class," for which Ms. McDonald won her second Tony, she learned by watching Zoe Caldwell, who would arrive hours early to delve into character as the great soprano Maria Callas.

Audra McDonald

Actress who stars in Broadway's 'Lady Day at Emerson's Bar Grill'

Won her first Tony (best featured actress in a musical) in 1994 as Carrie Pipperidge in 'Carousel,' and took the prize again in 1998 ('Ragtime')

Won best featured actress in a play in 1996 ('Master Class') and 2004 ('A Raisin in the Sun')

Won best lead actress in a musical in 2012 (The Gershwins' 'Porgy and Bess')

"She'd go through her warm-up. She'd put her makeup on. But really she was putting Maria Callas on," said Ms. McDonald, who applied that approach to "Lady Day," a show that is also about a real-life figure, and one in which the focus is on Ms. McDonald for virtually all of its 90 minutes, eight performances a week.

"I get to the theater at about 6 p.m. or 6:15 p.m. I need that time," she said. "I don't let anybody come in from a half-hour on. I go really deep within myself."

In "Lady Day," Ms. McDonald portrays Holiday late in life, struggling onstage and at times in an alcohol- or drug-addled stupor at a small club in Philadelphia. To emulate Holiday's husky jazz vocals, Ms. McDonald deepens her polished, near-operatic voice and adds a sultry smoothness.

The "Raisin in the Sun" cast joins WSJ Café to talk about their Tony nominations and Denzel Washington's role in the play. Photo: raisinbroadway.com

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It was her singing that attracted composer Michael John LaChiusa when he auditioned her in the early 1990s. He later wrote a show, " Marie Christine" for her voice, which he called "as natural as bird song but classically trained. She knew how to use it, most importantly for me, to tell a story."

Mr. LaChiusa was one of several young composers working on Broadway, including Jason Robert Brown and Adam Guettel, whose work Ms. McDonald sang in workshops of potential shows and other projects. When Nonesuch Records approached her about releasing an album, the result was 1998's "Way Back to Paradise," in which she took the unusual step of recording new theatrical songs rather than Broadway standards.

"She was part of a community that was, in a way, trying to reinvent musical theater," said Nonesuch President Bob Hurwitz.

Ms. McDonald has spent the bulk of her career on Broadway, but she also took a chance on television, starring as Dr. Naomi Bennett on the "Grey's Anatomy" spinoff "Private Practice" from 2007 to 2011.

She did it in part because she was scared of being on camera, she said. "Here's an opportunity to get over that fear."

This appetite for a challenge is something that rings a bell for Mr. Price, who directs her in "Lady Day." "You can't just bring her a part," he said. "I have to find something that nobody can do. And she will attempt what nobody can do because it scares her."

But that is at work. At home, she lives in Croton-on-Hudson with her husband, actor Will Swenson. She is active on Twitter, sharing funny moments, often about parenting, and promoting causes, such as same-sex marriage.

Is a sixth Tony in her future? "I'm just hoping I'm happy with the dress I wear, that my hair doesn't freak out," Ms. McDonald said, "and that I have a fun night with my husband, my daughter and my mom."

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